Category: UK & Europe

Research by Carlos Gonzales, Daniel Romein, Timmi Allen and “Bo” The following report contains reference to a child modelling studio producing child sexual abuse material in 2001. All names related to the studio are fictitious. The original source did not contain any explicit material. All the images accessed and used during the investigation were already…

On September 10, 2019, CNN reported that the United States helped a Russian government official flee after working as a spy for American intelligence in 2017 — all reportedly due to concerns regarding President Trump and his administration’s handling of “classified intelligence”. The CNN report was sparse on details, but it was enough to identify…

Written by Michael Colborne with contributions from Oleksiy Kuzmenko They’re devoted to a brand of neo-Nazism so blatant, including openly glorifying Hitler, that even its leader admits is too “hardcore” for the public space. Wotanjugend, which its founder described in 2016 as an online “mini-university for supporters of right-wing ideology,” has praised far-right terrorists like…

In a previous joint investigation with BuzzFeed News and the Insider, Bellingcat disclosed the inordinately frequent travel of two Italian politicians from the close circle of the head of Italy’s far-right party Lega Nord, and self-styled “Italian Trump” Matteo Salvini. As previously reported by Italian media and BuzzFeed, one of the frequent travelers and advisers…

What we know so far Last Friday, 23 August 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen living in Germany, was assassinated in downtown Berlin while having lunch on the way to a mosque for Friday prayer. Khangoshvili was assassinated with three bullets, two of them fired at close range at his head. The killer, who was…

A farewell to arms transfers? Not so much. Weapons likely purchased by Saudi Arabia from Serbia have wound up in the hands of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese army fighting at the Saudi-Yemen border. The RSF, the successor organization to the Janjaweed, has been accused of war crimes in Sudan — including…

On August 14, a Twitter thread that included a small army of “Amazon FC Ambassadors” went viral, bringing to light Amazon’s year-long social media brand ambassador program. What exactly are these “Amazon FC Ambassadors”, how many of them are there, and are they actually real people? The Amazon Research Agency These “Amazon FC Ambassadors” all…

On August 10, 2019, a 21-year-old man reportedly murdered his 17-year-old stepsister before attempted to attack a mosque just outside of Oslo, Norway; he managed to injure only one person in the attack. The Norwegian claimed he had been inspired by another 21-year-old man in El Paso, TX, whose massacre on August 3 was driven…

A sophisticated phishing campaign targeting Bellingcat and other Russia-focused journalists has been much larger in scope than previously thought, and has lasted at least several months. Bellingcat has identified dozens of targeted individuals across Europe and the US, with the earliest reported attack dating back to April 24 2019, and some evidence suggesting the campaign…

This week, a Ukrainian court ruled it’s not OK to call a neo-Nazi group a neo-Nazi group. In May 2018, a tweet from Ukrainian independent media outlet Hromadske, on its international English-language Twitter account, described C14 as “neo-Nazi.” “Neo-nazi group C14 has seized a former militant of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic”, Brazilian Rafael Lusvarghi,…